The building industry makes widespread use of concrete mixing trucks for transportation of ready mixed concrete to sites for concrete pours. These trucks typically comprise a large mixing assembly including a mixer drum mounted to the vehicle and which is connected to a mixer drive for mixing concrete contents during transportation and for discharge of the contents on site. The drive system comprises a gear box which takes power from the vehicle motor and which applies a mixing torque to the drum imparting axial rotation to the drum with the torque being adjustable depending upon the operating requirements. The above general arrangement is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,585,356 which discloses a concrete mixer truck having a mixer drum adapted to be rotated by the traction motor of the vehicle through an auxiliary transmission of the traction motor transmission.
According to the known vehicle mounted mixing assemblies, the mixing drum is typically of heavy duty steel construction and is disposed at approximately 10 to 15 degrees from horizontal. The drum is fitted with internal vanes or mixing blades defining an archimedian spiral so that as the drum rotates in a first direction the concrete held therein is mixed and as the drum is rotated in the opposite direction, the concrete is discharged from the drum via an elevated discharge orifice under the reverse action of the internal spiral vanes. The drum is disposed such that the drive end is lowest and the discharge end is highest relative to a generally horizontal plane of the vehicle.
While steel drums have been in use for many years, they suffer from a number of attendant disadvantages, relating to their cost of manufacture and replacement, working life, wear characteristics, weight and volume.
Steel drums are expensive to manufacture due to their labour intensive construction which involves rolling steel sheets into conical portions and cylinders which once fabricated are then welded to form the finished tank. The archimedian spirals formed from flat sheets are then welded into position inside the drum. As concrete is a highly abrasive material, internal surfaces of steel drums are subject to significant wear abrasion. This occurs particularly on the surfaces which take slump impact, sliding friction and shear load leading to eventual wearing out of the drum.
Typically, a steel drum used every day might last three to five years, thereafter requiring replacement at significant cost. The abrasion of internal surfaces is increased where there are changes in slope in the drum walls usually where the segments of the drum are joined.
The mixing blades are welded to the internal surface of the drum causing sharp angled recesses in which concrete can gather and eventually build up degrading the internal surface and providing a catchment for further unwanted build up of concrete. By its nature, a steel surface is relatively smooth and whilst this may be desirable for the purpose of preventing concrete build up on the walls of the drum, the interface between the concrete and steel wall is an area of abrasion rather than concrete mixing.
Ideally, mixing of concrete should take place throughout the whole mix, but in the steel drums, optimum mixing does not take place at the boundary layer and in crevices in which concrete may collect. In fact, due to the nature of the frictional interface between the steel surface and concrete boundary layer, laminar flow occurs resulting in little or no mixing at the boundary layer. The reason for this is that the aggregate in the concrete slides and abrades (with reduced or no mixing) rather than rotates to facilitate mixing. Thus there are ‘dead’ spots in the mix where no mixing takes place and where there is an increased potential for unwanted collection of concrete. In addition to the above problems associated with the use of steel mixing drums, there are cost and weight factors which add to inherent inefficiencies in use of steel drums. Due to the dead weight of the steel drum, its volume must be restricted so the combination of the dead weight and concrete weight must be maintained within the maximum allowable loading limits for the vehicle to which the drum is attached. The inventor considered the possibility of using a lightweight material such as plastics for construction of a concrete mixing drum as a substitute for steel whilst recognizing that there were numerous structural and manufacturing difficulties to be overcome in making the transition to plastics not the least of which was the production of a drum which could withstand the high static and dynamic loadings to which truck mounted mixing drums are subject to in normal operation. If the weight of the drum could be reduced without compromising and possibly increasing drum volume the weight reduction could be taken up with additional concrete thereby increasing the pay load.